In the longer view of things, liberalism might actually be one of the most unstable systems of government ever tried.
Consider that the government of the current US constitution, the longest-running experiment in democracy since the ancient Greeks, is about as old as the Chakri dynasty of Thailand, and much younger than many other long-lived regimes.
It's entirely possible liberal democracy only obtains in a very narrow set of short-lived conditions, and naturally tends to devolve into previous political forms the moment those conditions disappear (cf. Fukuyama's final chapter in 'End of History').
I find it interesting that the liberal withering you see all over the West is much less present in Israel, where you have: 1. Mandatory conscription 2. A state of constant war 3. A 'frontier' to be settled 4. Overt assimilation of immigrants into a national ideal
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
It's astonishing how quickly this happened. From the civil rights and women's rights movements of the 60s/70s/80s creating the most equitable and fair society in human history, to backsliding into racial and gender identity as definitive in something like a single generation.
Is it worth racializing everything for the tiny fraction of the audience that will get anything out of this?
This is the issue with the overweening empathy of (post-Christian) wokeness: there's no way to apply the brakes and say 'enough'.
First in a new Pull Request series on the New American Right.
There's a vision of post-Trump conservatism being dreamed up by academics and writers, and it's fusing with workaday politics. I'm setting out to understand it.
This was partly spurred by a NYT piece that dropped on this burgeoning movement (which I've been following for a while and includes some people I know), which both thrust the scene into the mainstream light and also caused a bit of a ruckus within it.
It's intriguing how journalists updating their mistaken notions of the world constitutes the very fact-finding process at the core of their profession.
Sure, progress. But it would also help if they didn't start from such a low base.
Take this thread.
We've finally ascertained that FB uses FB internally, so their internal convo is like online discourse: posts are informal discussions, notes are blogs, and documents are formal conclusions with management buy-in. There are no 'memos'.
For the millionth time, the media is fabricating a moral panic around their belated discovery that Facebook does what they do, but better, more scalably, and more profitably.
This is the 2016 Facebook panic all over again, but with fewer Russians. You’d think the storyline would get old, but no…
There's almost nothing novel in the leaked Facebook docs, other than confirmation of Facebook's slowing growth and aging userbase.
Everything being discussed now was being discussed years ago. There were whole chapters in Chaos Monkeys about it. Big whoop.
@realchrisrufo When I did my due diligence on someone that the entire NYT/WaPo/NYer media empyrean is lining up to trash, I was surprised to discover his background as a mainstream PBS/Netflix blue-state filmmaker.
But then something flipped....
@realchrisrufo The @realchrisrufo I spoke to no longer cares about the elite media sphere; he cares about winning anti-CRT measures across the United States, one school district at a time.